My hero (me) is good on horseback. When emotions are too much for him, he simply rides off. Later he rides back. Once he says, in all seriousness, “Can a man keep a flame burning in his breast without his clothes catching fire?”
It is something to consider. My love for Adèle must be visible to all who see us together. In some ways it is a relief to be in exile at the Hôtel de Rouen. I am not in danger of being discovered making love to Adèle in my novel.
When my hand is tired and cramped from writing, or when I must open another bottle of ink or replenish my sheaf of paper, I pause from my work and look out the window, across the river, out over the countryside that borders the outer edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg. I like this view. I like being so high up, as though I am on the topmast of a ship.
My hero (me) narrates the second part of the book from on board a ship. He has to periodically put down his pen to attend to the duties of sailing.
When I write about our love, I realize how unsettled it has made me. I now depend on my morning ritual of shaving, coffee, pacing, writing. I can lean on it, and on the bad days, the unsteady days, it will hold me up. There was nothing to lean on in my love for Adèle. We did not have the luxury of routine. Every time we met, it was fraught with stored-up emotion, with the fear that we would not be able to meet up again soon.
My hero (me) goes to the monastery at Port-Royal. He decides to undergo training for the priesthood and spends his days praying, reading, going for long walks, eating simple meals with the monks. His small cell is sparsely furnished, and he does not want for more. Occasionally there is singing at a meal. More occasionally there is cake. The time passes blessedly, uneventfully.
After he is ordained, he leaves the monastery, riding off on horseback to visit Madame de Couaen. When he gets to her house, he finds her on her deathbed. She is, of course, overjoyed at seeing him, and she asks him, with her husband’s blessing, to take her last confession and deliver her the sacraments. He does this, with great feeling. She is grateful. She dies.
I put down my pen. I feel drained of words, empty of emotion. By killing off Madame de Couaen, I have preserved the love she felt for my hero (me) without having to consider its future. It has met a logical end. The love has transcended from a physical plane to a spiritual one, but it has remained constant. I fear there will be nothing so convenient for Adèle and me. Our future is, unfortunately, beyond the control of my pen.
I HAVE MADE a new friend.
Even though I am in hiding from the militia, I am still reviewing for the Globe. It was my good fortune to be assigned two novels by the same author. Excellent books, both of them, and I say as much in my reviews. I also write to the author, conveying my admiration and asking if I can meet with him.
He agrees, and so I put on a hat to disguise my face, puff up the steep stairs to his apartment, and knock on his door.
“Ah, Sainte-Beuve. Welcome.” The door opens to allow me admittance, but I remain in the hallway, confused.
“George?”
“The same.”
I almost burst into laughter, but that would be rude, so I restrain myself (barely) and walk into the apartment of the young, brilliant Parisian author.
George Sand is a woman. Despite her masculine pen name and her male dress and her cigarette smoking—she is very much a woman. She sports male dress in order to have more freedom in society.
Friendship is best when it is founded on mutual respect or when there is a sameness of character, and George and I are full of admiration for each other’s work. We were also born in the same year. But what binds us most closely together is love, and the torment it offers us.
Once, George, despairing of her many unsatisfactory affairs, asked me, “What is love?”
“Tears,” I replied. “If you weep, you love.”
“I have asked this question of many people,” she said, “and you are the only one who has answered honestly.”
There are no women allowed in the Hôtel de Rouen, but George Sand, dressed as a man, passes by the inscrutable Madame Ladame without a glance. We sit in room number nineteen and read our novels aloud to each other. Her book, Leila, is further along than my Volupté, but this does not bother me. She writes faster. Every night, from midnight to dawn, she pens twenty pages. Sometimes, she confesses, she is able to complete a book in as little as thirty days. I admire her industry and her passion. We both believe that one must be moved by what one has written in order for the reader to be moved in turn. Passion is everything.
George’s real name is Aurore. As Aurore, she was married to a man who was unfaithful, and she has left him and her two children. The loss of the children pains her and she hopes to be reunited with them soon, but I am heartened by her example of desertion. Perhaps it could serve as a model for Adèle?
When George and I meet in the Hôtel de Rouen, we always start out by talking about writing, and we always end up by talking about love. One day we are sitting by the open window. It is hot in the room and there is only a tepid breeze to cool us. We have removed our waistcoats. George mops her forehead with a pocket handkerchief.
“Charles,” she says, “I need a new lover. My independence is a cage that imprisons me.”
I think hard for a moment, running through the tally of writers I know.
“What about Mérimée?” I ask. Prosper Mérimée, the novelist, is a bit of a rake, but he is a strong character, and George’s will needs to be matched with a strong character.
“Can you arrange a meeting?”
I have dropped out of Victor’s Cénacle, but I am still friends with Mérimée and Émile Deschamps.
“I can.”
“Done,” says George, as though we have just completed a business transaction.
A week later she is back in my room.
“It was awful,” she says. “He was arrogant and a terrible womanizer. He tired of me and even had the gall to toss me a five-franc tip on his way out the door.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is there no one else?” George puts her hand on my arm. “I’m fairly desperate, and you’re the only one who will help me. I asked Liszt to advise me on love, and he said that the only love worth having was the love of God.” George smiles at me, knowing in advance that I will agree with what she is about to say. “But if one has loved a man, it is very hard to love God.”
I envy her assurance and her brilliance, and I know that Leila will make her famous. It is a wonderful novel. I anticipate a future for her that is full of lovers and full of books. I tell her so.
It strikes me that if the situation were reversed, she would probably have women to put forth to me as possible lovers. But even the thought of this makes me feel guilty. I still love Adèle, and have told George as much. How could I even think of anyone else? And more important, with my secret, how could anyone think of me? Although I’m half tempted to ask. What if it was someone very beautiful?
“What about Alfred de Musset?” I ask, ridding myself of treasonous thoughts and getting back to the task at hand. “He’s very handsome.”
“And very young,” says George.
“Full of passion,” I say.
That’s the magic word, for both of us. George nods her head slowly in agreement, and it is done.
They become lovers practically from their first meeting. She writes to me from Venice, where they have gone together, telling me of their fights, of Alfred’s rashness and accusations. He is jealous of her night writing and leaves her to that while he attends violent orgies, returning to her in the mornings full of remorse, then flying into a rage and charging her with wanting to have him committed to an insane asylum.
“I should have known from the beginning,” she says when we see each other again. “I should have known by the names we called each other that the relationship was doomed.”
“What were the names?”
“I called him ‘My poor child.’” George sighs. “It’s embarrassing,” she says.
“Wh
at did he call you?”
“‘My big George.’”
I’m not sure George will come to me for advice on love again.
Later, George writes to me, “I think right now I am incapable of love, but I am capable of friendship.”
I tell George about Charlotte. I tell her about my condition. I have never told anyone other than Adèle, but George is more sympathetic than I would have guessed.
“Poor Charles,” she says. “No wonder you mourn the loss of Adèle.”
It is a relief to confide in someone, but it does not really change anything fundamental. I still suffer because of my strange body. I still fear that I will never find another lover. And there is a limit to what someone can understand from the outside. I remain as alone as ever inside my skin.
I DO REMEMBER GEORGE in love again, years later. I remember sitting with her and the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin in the Jardin du Luxembourg. It is spring. We are sitting on chairs in the sun near the orchard where Adèle and I used to walk so long ago. Frédéric and George are lovers. I have come to meet them, to walk out with them, but as Chopin is sickly and tires easily, we have settled on these chairs in the spring sun so he can rest.
For a while we talk, and then we don’t, just listen to the wind in the trees overhead. Chopin coughs occasionally, a sharp retort, like a rifle. The wind drags the branches of the trees across the blue patch of sky. The noise is like the sea on the shingle, a noise I remember from my childhood.
My memories, as I write this down, are often out of sequence, out of time. It does not matter to me that events have slipped their chronology. There is a natural order to things, and I am following that now. Recollection is exactly that, a re-collection. And so I have added this later memory of George and Frédéric because it belongs to the group of memories that encompass my friendship with her.
By the time we sat together in the Jardin du Luxembourg, George and I had known each other a long time. Our companionship was an easy one. Old friends are as easy with each other as new lovers.
The wind in the trees was the whisper of water on stone. It was the breath of blood in the veins. It was a place where two novelists—George and I—felt perfectly comfortable. A place we had worked hard to get to—in our individual work, and in our friendship. A place entirely without words.
VICTOR HAS A LOVER. She is an actress. Her name is Juliette Drouet, and Victor met her when she was playing the part of Princess Négroni in his play Lucrèce Borgia.
I did not get this information from Adèle, whom I still have not seen since I went into hiding, but from George Sand, who says it is the talk of Paris. She tells me that Juliette has become Victor’s mistress, and that they are very much in love. No mention of my Adèle and how she must be feeling about this. But I can guess that she will not be happy, and I can hope that this new situation might inspire her to finally leave her husband and be with me.
It is too late to see Juliette Drouet in Lucrèce Borgia, but Victor, who is alarmingly prolific these days, has written a new play, Marie Tudor, in which his mistress appears with Mademoiselle George, the famous actress who was once the mistress of Napoleon.
I buy a ticket for opening night.
It is hard not to think of that other night, it seems like ages ago now, when Adèle and I went to see Hernani at the same theatre. How excited I was, setting out on that evening’s adventure. How my hands shook as I shaved and dressed in anticipation of seeing my beloved.
Now I shave and dress slowly, sluggishly, in my little room at the top of the Hôtel de Rouen. The Hotel of Ruin. There is nothing to hurry my heart along the streets to the Comédie-Française. Nothing to spark my blood as I squeeze along the row and take my seat in the middle of the first balcony. Adèle is not beside me, and although I scan the seats in front of me and down in the dress circle, I do not see her. Why would she come to see her husband’s mistress on the stage? But I look for her anyway. It is a force of habit at this point, to look for her, to hope she is nearby.
Marie Tudor is a play about the British monarchy. There are only three characters: Queen Mary of England; Lady Jane Grey, who was queen for just nine days; and the executioner who beheads her. Juliette Drouet plays Lady Jane, and it is clear from the first few moments she is on stage that she is not a good actress. She mumbles her lines and keeps her head bowed, as though she’s looking for something she has accidentally dropped on the floor of the stage. It doesn’t help her cause that Mademoiselle George, despite being a woman of middle years, is still vibrant and beautiful and such a magnificent actress. I almost feel sorry for the hapless Juliette. But then I remember Adèle and take delight in the bad performance, and in the hisses the audience delivers to the young woman.
Victor is in the lobby after the play is over. He is blocking my route to the door, and so I slink behind a pillar and wait for him to leave. But he seems intent on talking to the audience members as they exit the theatre, scanning the crowd for important people. I can only hide behind the pillar for so long. I am getting looks for my skulking behaviour.
“Charles.” He sees me immediately.
“Victor.”
He is still compact and sprightly, always looking so ridiculously healthy that I feel like an invalid in comparison.
“What did you think?” he asks.
There is no point in hiding my honesty. There is nothing left of our friendship to protect.
“Lady Jane was dreadful,” I say, and I watch as the slightest ripple of pain washes over his face. To someone who didn’t know the man, it would not even have been noticeable. I admire his professionalism.
“Ah. Well, yes. I think she might be retiring after this performance.”
“Won’t that affect your relations with her?”
“Not at all, Charles. Not at all.” Victor looks almost sorry for me, and I hate him in the moment. “How have you been, my old friend? You do not look well. I hear you have been on the run from the Garde nationale.”
“I am quite well,” I say, but I do not feel that this is entirely true. “And although I am in hiding, my life is otherwise unaffected.”
“Really?” Victor regards me quizzically, and I have the sense that he knows Adèle no longer meets with me, that he possesses more information about our affair than I do. “Surely being in hiding would change everything about your life.”
It is not a question. Once again, as always in our friendship, Victor has simply pronounced, and there is no arguing with his version of reality. And just as I always do when Victor disregards my feelings, I offer up something else for him to savage instead of defending myself.
“I’m writing a novel,” I say.
“What about?”
“Love.”
“That’s a very ambitious subject.”
We are an island amid the sea of people leaving the theatre, and we are buffeted by the departing audience. Victor grabs my shoulder to stop his drift away from me. For a moment we look into each other’s eyes, without rancour or pretence or boastfulness. I recognize my old friend, and I see something else in his face. I see his happiness. Juliette Drouet may be a bad actress, but she is undoubtedly a good lover. She has made the great poet very happy.
“Come and see me, Charles,” says Victor. “Let us talk more about your novel.” For a brief moment it is as it always was between us, as though Victor has forgotten what happened to our friendship, or forgiven it. But then he remembers my trespasses, drops his hand from my shoulder, and moves away from me, towards the lobby doors. “Yes,” he says, “come and visit us soon. My wife often asks what has become of you.”
I DO NOT GO to see Victor. Adèle comes to see me. Madame Ladame delivers the message with my morning coffee. A hastily scribbled note from my beloved, asking me to meet her in the Jardin du Luxembourg at noon.
Who sees love arriving? Who can gauge the movements one person makes towards another? Movements so slight, so tentative that they almost seem to be invisible.
Who sees love arri
ving—but who doesn’t see it leaving?
Adèle is waiting for me when I arrive at the gardens. She is pacing among the statuary, staring at the ground, in much the same way Victor’s mistress was studying the stage floor the night I went to see her disastrous performance in Marie Tudor.
I am almost upon Adèle before she notices me. She stops. I stop. It is so long since we’ve seen each other that all the old endearments wither on my tongue.
“Charles,” she says, “you’ve come.”
“Of course.”
She holds out her hand and I take it shyly.
“Walk with me,” she says. “I am too restless to sit.”
It is a cool afternoon. The sun disappears behind clouds, peeks out again. Because it isn’t a fine day, we might be the only people in the orchard. Adèle and I walk along the gravel paths, past the ornamental maze, towards the orchard.
“Victor has a mistress,” says Adèle.
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“It is the talk of Paris.” I decide not to mention going to see Juliette Drouet in Victor’s play.
Adèle stops me with a hand on my arm. “Do you think we were ever the talk of Paris?” she asks.
“I’m not sure. Probably not. I don’t think we’re as …” I search for the right word. “We’re not as blatant as Victor.”
“Boastful, you mean.”
“Confident,” I say. “We’re not as confident as Victor.”
We reach the orchard. I look at the tags on the apple trees without comment. Our game belonged to those halcyon days before I told Victor of my affair with Adèle. There’s no point in even mentioning the apple names now. We walk past the Great Unknown. Both of us look at it, and both of us look away.
Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 43